After a night of unusually heavy sleep occasioned by late work on Hagerstein’s ridiculously inept thesis on St. Gandolphus, I awoke to find a light still burning faintly in this study. I entered, to discover that the gleam was that of a vigil light (late Ninth Century) burning before my treasured Tenth-Century image of Our Lady, Font of Piety. Upon the prie-dieu (Thirteenth Century, but betraying unquestionable Tenth-Century influence), which normally stood across the room but now had been adjusted directly before the image, lay a Tenth-Century illuminated breviary, open at the Office of the Blessed Virgin. Most startling fact of all, there was still visible upon the worn velvet of the prie-dieu the fresh and unmistakable imprint of human knees.
You will surely recall the legend (it is no more, as I have incontestably established) of the novice who fell asleep in the midst of copying a manuscript and awakened to find his task completed and the text illuminated far beyond his powers, with the minute signature woven into one of the initial letters: Gandolphus. There persists a handful of similar accounts of the unobserved and somewhat elfin post mortem activities of St. Gandolphus the Lesser; you will readily understand why the unseen fellow-tenant of my apartment was thenceforth, to me, Gandolphus.
But the contradictory nature of his activities puzzled me; one night of drunken orgy, one night of kneeling prayer. Nor was the puzzle closer to solution upon that morning on which I discovered in this typewriter an exquisite sonnet—so remarkable in its perfection that it has since been accepted for publication, under a pseudonym, by one of our better journals—signed (as though the invader could read my mind) with the name Gandolphus.
I shall pass rapidly over the embarrassing morning when I awakened with a curious pain in my back, to discover in the guest-room a fair-haired young woman who greeted me with the indecipherable remark “Honey! . . . Hey! For a minute I thought you was him!”, who proved to be the vendor of cigarettes at a nearby place of entertainment, and who departed abruptly and in a state of bewilderment conceivably exceeding my own.
Nor shall I linger over the disappearance of two thousand dollars in ten-dollar bills, present in the apartment because a certain type of art dealer, I must confess, prefers transactions of this sort (fuller details, I assure you, would have no bearing upon this investigation), and the ecstasy of the more impoverished Italians in Bleecker Street over the vaguely described stranger who had pounded on shoddy doors in dead of night to deliver handfuls of bills.
I shall simply stress here the cumulative inconsistency of these proceedings: inebriety, religiosity, poetry, eroticism, philanthropy . . . an insane medley of the loftiest and basest experiences of which the human animal is capable.
It is this inconsistency which leads me unhesitatingly to reject the most apparently obvious “solution” of my mystery: that the fellow occupant of my apartment is no other than myself; that Box and Cox, Harrington and Gandolphus, are, in short, Jekyll and Hyde.
For whereas of his actions to date the inebriety and the concupiscence might be considered evidence of Hydean depravity, the sonnet and the almsgiving represent an exalted sublimation of which, I confess, the poor Jekyll in question is flatly incapable; and the religiosity, to my mind, fits into neither character. This is not I, nor yet another I. This is a being unknown to me, sharing the apartment to which only I have access, and indulging in actions which seem to me to have only this in common: that all represent singularly heightened forms of human experience.
This brings me to what I fear may well be the most overwhelming experience which Gandolphus has yet known, and the reason which has driven me, at whatever cost to the placidity of my own ordered existence, finally to lay this problem before a private detective and, upon his insistence, to communicate it to the police.
When I conveyed to you the nature of the incidents already here related, I found it hard to explain even to myself what “mental block” (if I may be permitted so jargonic a term) prevented me from communicating to you this evidence of the ultimate extremity of the quest of Gandolphus.
I refer, of course, to the kitchen knife which I discovered this morning still coated with blood which a private laboratory this afternoon assured me is human.
* * *
It is considerate of me, I think, to put those three asterisks there to denote the transition.
The knife, of course, is what alters the whole situation. That one bloody fact is sufficient to disrupt the tranquil modus vivendi which I believed that I had attained.
If you professional detectives, public and private, are as perceptive as, in rummaging around in this mind, I find some reason to believe you are, you will by now have realized many things. You will have understood, for instance, precisely what happened that Saturday night in Washington Square, and that the bright and exploding object was not a toy spaceship.
You will even understand, perhaps, which word should have been underlined in that last sentence.
But I am not at all sorry that things should end as they now must. I have felt hampered here. It is not the ideal habitation in which to pursue my research. I was forced to realize this, in a somewhat comical but nonetheless vexatious manner, in the fourth of the episodes related above, and again to some extent in the sixth, that of the knife. There is also the matter of music, which I gather from reading to be one of the major human experiences; but these ears that I employ are tone-deaf.
In short, I need a better vehicle.
